Every decade or so, a strange creative light descends upon a city and incubates its musical talent, like the black Monolith arriving in 2001: A Space Odyssey and hurtling human development onwards to an uncertain and more complex future The light warms, protects and catalyses the fledgling talent until the [...]
I was struck reading Billy Bragg’s recent polemic in the NME, ‘Why music needs to get political again’, how much I agreed with the old left wing firebrand about the need for contemporary musicians to support young people in their very real grievances. Not in the nihilistic destruction and looting [...]
There isn’t a section on Spotify for ‘Peculiar’. You can’t search for ‘odd’ or ‘strange’ even if you wanted to. This is a shame, as there are lots of very fine, interesting, influential, important and genuinely entertaining recordings that you may never get to find or hear. So, to help [...]